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Fighting Misogyny in Gaming Begins At Home

There are many, many facets to obstacles facing women in gaming. There’s the fact that most big games are still blood and guts fantasies meant to appeal to young men There’s the way female developers are treated within the industry, as if some can’t believe they actually work there (see the whole #1reasonwhy movement we’ve discussed recently). But perhaps most pressingly, it’s how female players are treated when they play the games themselves, or even express an interest in gaming in general.

The reality of being a girl gamer is downright astonishing at times. Something as innocuous as a feminine-sounding gamertag can draw in an inbox full of horrifying messages. Speaking over voicechat and revealing your gender is taken as an invitation for sexual harassment.

The best (well, worst) way to see this in action at the moment would likely be the blog “Fat, Ugly or Slutty.” The name refers to the three most common paths of insults directed from men to women over gaming services, both console and PC. Female gamers take screenshots of the creeps that send them gender-based hate mail. It’s fun to publicly shame the clowns, but it speaks to the fact that the community has a lot of growing up to do.

That’s often a common excuse when this issue is brought up. Many of these harassers are not grown up. Many are young teenage males and therefore the excuse becomes, “well, they’re just being boys, they’ll grow out of it eventually.”

But that’s not it. No matter what age you are, there’s no excuse for behaving in this fashion. As kids, we all usually grow up with some sort of playful “war of the genders.” Boys are gross, girls have cooties, etc. As time goes on however, that changes once sexual maturity begins.

Or at least it's supposed to.

There’s something inherently rotten in society now where young boys are treating girls this way. When I was a pre-teen or teenager (or in the years after, for that matter) I never leveled verbal abuse at a girl in any of the “fat, ugly or slutty” categories. This isn’t “normal behavior” for young males. This is conditioning by society, and apparently being respectful toward women is now something that must be outright taught to these young men.

Many parents will have talks with their sons about girls. Be it the awkward sex talk which has little to do with interpersonal relationships, or giving a shy kid ideas on how to talk to girls. But now it seems that kids need outright lessons in how to respect women. Parents, if they witness this behavior or even hear about it in regards to their children, need to sit them down and explain that isn’t how you treat people, women especially. Some of these offenders may have serious, deep-rooted issues with women in their lives, but most of the younger crowd are just trying to be funny, and that’s something that can be pushed back against. I would even suggest a system that emails the parents of underage players transcripts or recordings of vile language used in game. They need a way to know this is happening in the first place.

It would be remiss to assume that all these insult-spewers are in fact, twelve year old boys. The fact is, this just isn’t true. There are many, many adult men taking part in this kind of behavior. Though that information can’t necessarily be gleaned from Xbox Live messages, it can be from places outside of video games. I’ve seen countless blogs similar to Fat, Ugly or Slutty detailing the kinds of perverted messages females receive on a daily basis on dating sites like OKCupid or PlentyofFish. These aren’t kids, and the older the messager, the more graphic the message most times.

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Mason752 isn’t telling you to feel guilty, just to acknowledge that life is harder if you’re not Caucasian, Male or Straight in a society that has historically undermined the rights and freedoms of other groups.

It may not be your fault; growing up without any kind of racial, sexist or homophobic discrimination could understandably make you think that it’s the same for everybody, and that minorities are always supposed to be ostracized. But if you’ve fallen into that trap – and it looks like you have – you need to immediately learn that you can relate to other humans, and be less of an ignorant person.

I can’t even read these comments because their arguments are just so deluded and sad. I like how “The God of Conquest” referred to women as “your kind.” Like women are some kind of separate and inferior species. By the way I am a married man not one of those “other kinds.” Sorry for the flames Paul keep fighting the good fight.

I have to fully admit to personally not encountering harassment toward women while gaming online. However I do here the N-word almost constantly while trying to play black ops 2 on XBL either that or “Gay”, “Homo”, “Faggot” or some reference to taking it in the… well you know where.

Online gaming communities , in general, just hosts some of the worst behavior you can experience. I believe that this is honestly because of young males and not knowing how to manage their competitive emotions. The fact that no one can immediately reprimand them for their actions is the reason this behavior has grown. If they were competing in a sporting event and any racial, sexual, or gender issues arose (and lets be honest, video games are just as competitive if not more at this point) a parent or coach could immediately handle the situation. Until something like that exists or we take away from of the anomaly of online gaming, these actions will continue.

I fully imagine that if there is ever a post-apocalyptic world, that this is the behavior that would occur. Where there is lawlessness, there will be chaos. Which is how I would describing online gaming.

Wait what, “sporting event”? This isn’t the WCG or World Series of video games where professional teams play against each other for some cup and prize money, it’s just people likely playing together with their friends and smack-talking while doing so. You must’ve missed out on being together with friends on the basketball court or playing football/soccer in your spare time, trying to relax and what was being said on such occasions. There are neither parents nor coaches supervising anyone in that situation to tell people what they’re not allowed to say… And even in professional matches like the world cup/europa cup in soccer or similar there’s still yellow/red cards handed out for (verbal) abuse between players and insulting the referee etc. because people aren’t perfect and especially when they want to have fun with each other after a long day at work at school/work in their free time they might not want to follow “feminism handbook on proper manners 101”.

Also, regarding some of those messages, some might just simply be making fun of people with social insecurities/impairments that genuinely don’t know how to talk to people, it would seem natural that they might try doing it online in their element if they freeze up otherwise and it might go all kinds of wrong, I remember this prime example: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbr0rbvUCz1ribwlro1_1280.jpg

We should be teaching children how to treat *people* with respect. The second you start saying ‘we need to respect this group’ you are in effect pointing out their differences rather than the things you have in common.

Of course all of this is hardly surprising anyway. Film and TV shows only show women who have a certain look and are below a certain age – even radio stations are more likely to pick young attractive women as presenters. In games and advertising women are almost always attractive, large chested and wearing as little as they can get away with. Hardly astonishing then that those who play games may be a little…warped…in their behaviour around women.

In the real world you very quickly learn that such overt behaviour has consequences – when I was growing up that involved a kick like a mule, fast reflexes, eye-watering accuracy and steel toe-capped shoes. (Unless it was my Gran, who had a very large handbag with a horseshoe in the bottom). In the virtual world however there are few consequences, until or unless someone works out a way to drop-kick the idiots in the groin through a monitor.

I’d rather people grow up with a basic sense of humor and a thicker skin so they don’t take everything someone says at face value, get “offended” and make an extremely big deal out of nothing. Louis C.K. put it rather well: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-july-16-2012/louis-c-k-

And if they do, at least use the proper means like mute/block or report that have been put there in wise foresight of people possibly having to make use of them by the system designers instead of constantly getting outraged about it on the Internet.

But that’s not even the bizarre part; the bizarre part is how much attention a single feminist blog with an obvious agenda gets on the matter. And I can assure you that men do very much get the same treatment with otherwise directed insults mostly questioning their sexuality, the sexual prowess of their mother, their nationality/race and so on. If you’ve ever visited places like 4chan you’d know that not everyone will treat everyone else in the utmost respectful manner possible on the Internet, nor should they have to as long as there’s no law against it, similar to there being no basic right to not be offended in the real world. You’re neither their parents, nor part of the moral Internet police that was put in place to tell people how they have to behave.

It’s just that most people have either learned to smack talk back or ignore/report it.

For that matter, it’s apparently not only little boys that do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c91VGy2nNw I’m not sure how this is about “misogyny” again instead of plain bad manners or simply young people blowing off steam just because that one feminist blog says it is and chooses to frame it that way.

“Those arguing about “free speech” fail to realize that hate speech isn’t covered under such a provision.” If you’re talking about the First Amendment, it does, in fact, protect hate speech. But the First Amendment is irrelevant to how private entities regulate speech in their forums and such. The misunderstanding of this is widespread.

“I can call you a slut if I want! It’s a free country!” Well, sure. But I can stand up and point out what a lowlife cretin you are. And if XBL wants to ban you for being a cretin, the First Amendment is in no way involved.

What I don’t understand is why people go to great lengths to justify belittling others’ attempts to counter sexism. Sexual harassment is bad. Industry discrimination is bad. These aren’t hard concepts to grasp. If you’re not going to help resolve the problem, don’t go out of your way to make it worse.